While the exemplary embodiment is particularly directed to the art of digital image processing, and will be thus described with specific reference thereto, it will be appreciated that the exemplary embodiment may have usefulness in other fields and applications.
Serial printing architectures (and parallel printing architectures to some extent) enable printing on one page using more than one print engine. For example, a printing system could be used for enhanced color printing. In this regard, highlight colors, gamut extension toners, and clear coats could be printed with a second print engine. See, for example, U.S. Publication No. US-2006-0222378-A1, published Jan. 4, 2007, entitled “PRINTING SYSTEM,” by Paul C. Julien. Other printers utilize more than four colorants in their printing processes. Recent developments have aimed at the needs presented by these printing processes by enabling the appearance of conventional rosette halftoning while using more than four colorants.
However, print quality can suffer from misregistration defects in certain serial and parallel printing architectures. For instance, shifted page numbers and tilted text lines can be observed in show-through if front-to-back registration is poor in the second engine. Further, using serial and parallel printing to incorporate additional colorants or image content on a previously printed sheet can result in color halos around printed objects if the image printed by the second engine is not registered with the first printing.
In the area of handling a document by multiple print engines, some systems may lightly fuse the image produced by a first print engine so it will not be distorted by fusing or smeared during handling into a second print engine have been developed. See, for example, U.S. Publication No. US-2007-0071465-A1, Published Mar. 29, 2007, by Hamby et al.
Therefore, what is needed is a method for re-registering these documents before the second print engine. In the “light first-fusing” scenario, the re-registration needs can be considered zero-order and first-order, where only offset and skew must be corrected. If heavier fusing is applied in the first print engine, higher-order re-registration operations, which can be more difficult, are needed to account for more complicated paper distortion.